America's Most Walkable Cities

The great economic reset we are in the midst of extends even to
Americans' choices of places to live. The popularity of sprawling
auto-dependent suburbs is waning. A majority of Americans--six in 10--say they would prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods, in both cities
and suburbs, if they could. Writing in The Wall Street Journal
a few months ago, I noted how changes in our economy and demography are
altering "the texture of suburban life in favor of denser, more
walkable, mixed-use communities." Christopher Leinberger has shown the positive effects of walkability in cities, towns, and suburbs; the architects Ellen Dunham Jones and June Williamson
have detailed ways that older car-oriented suburbs can be retrofitted
into more people-friendly, mixed-use, walkable communities. And
walkability pays. According to research by Joe Cortright, housing prices have held up better in more walkable communities.

Walkscore.com,
the online group that rates walkable neighborhoods, provides
detailed data on walkability for 2,500 cities and 6,000 neighborhoods
across the United States. Nate Berg of planetizen
used their data to come up with a new way to rate and rank America's
most walkable cities and metros. The chart below shows his results. The
first column shows how metros stack up on walkscore.com's
overall walkability index. The second lists Berg's calculation based on
the number of neighborhoods in these metros that have above-average
walk scores. (Details on Berg's methodology are here.)

Either way
you slice it, San Francisco tops the list, followed by the East Coast
communities of the Bos-Wash corridor: NYC, Boston, Philly, and D.C.
Seattle and Portland do well, as does Chicago. Somewhat surprisingly,
L.A. scores reasonably highly on both metrics.

With the
steady statistical hand of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we examined
the correlations between this new walkability data and key economics
and demographics of metro areas.

As before,
we found significant associations. Walkable metros had higher levels of
highly educated people (.44) and of the creative class (.46). Perhaps
more significantly, they also had higher incomes (.64) and higher
housing values (.55), more high-tech companies (.58), and greater levels
of innovation (.4).

Walkability
is more than an attractive amenity--it's a magnet for attracting and
retaining the highly innovative businesses and highly skilled people
that drive economic growth, raising housing values and generating higher
incomes.

Richard Florida is Co-founder and Editor at Large of CityLab.com and Senior Editor at The Atlantic. He isdirector of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and Global Research Professor at NYU.
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